COBOL, an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages. COBOL is still used in business, finance and administrative systems and is continuously evolving with revisions and dialects. In 2002 the fourth revision of COBOL introduced object-orientation, bit and Boolean support, floating point support, and many other features.
In order to function on a computer, human-readable source code (such as programs written in COBOL) must be translated into a computer-readable binary form called object code. Traditionally, compilers, interpreters or just-in-time (“JIT”) compilers would accomplish the task of translating instructions written in a high level programming language to a lower level language. Although the distinctions are not perfectly clear, generally compilers make the translation just once and store the object code for repeated use, interpreters translate the source code for every execution, and JIT compilers represent a hybrid approach, with both continuously translating and caching the translated code. COBOL is described as a complied language, meaning neither interpreters nor JIT compilers are used to execute COBOL source code.
The desire to achieve greater portability led to the development of bytecodes—compact numeric codes that denote instruction sets. Bytecodes are designed for efficient execution by an interpreter or a JIT compiler, as well as being suitable for compilation. They are lower level than source code, but not the lowest level of object code, representing an intermediate translation. The environment (such as a Java™ Virtual Machine or a .NET Framework) makes the final step of translating the bytecode to object code, introducing hardware and operating system dependence. The Java™ specification was developed by Sun Microsystems™, now a division of Oracle™. The .NET Framework is a software framework developed by Microsoft™ for Windows™ operating systems.
When portability of COBOL is desired, prior solutions, such as those described by U.S. Pat. No. 6,453,464 to Sullivan, hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes, use templates to translate high-level COBOL source code into high-level Java source code.
There are continuing efforts to improve translations.